Don't Lick That Metal Pole!!

Assignment Three: October 17-20
I Wish Someone Had Told Me...

"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it." (Andre Gide)
What is the best piece of advice you've ever received? (Consider an answer other than the obvious-- never lick a metal pole in winter.) Who provided that advice? What made it so valuable?Using these questions only as a starting point, write a personal narrative that explains what made this advice so valuable to you and what you think you have learned from it. Be sure to explain who gave you that advice and in what context s/he provided it.


“Time to wake up.”
My mother shakes me gently and murmurs something vaguely encouraging, attempting to coax me out of my warm bed; my pillows have never felt so comfortable.
The urge to ignore school’s existence is stronger than ever today, for today is a huge day in the life of a first-semester high school junior: the day of the PSAT’s. Whoopee. It seems like the most momentous, pressure-packed day of my life, though there are far worse days not far on the horizon.
Not that I realize that now. Not today; today, all I feel is a sickening mix of anticipation, trepidation, and grogginess. One thing I will come to realize: early morning + important exam + not enough sleep = a fairly unhappy young lady.
So I roll out of bed, my bare feet pressing themselves into the rough carpet on my floor (which feels like a cactus compared with the comforter they had just been wrapped up in, I might add). I scuffle out of my room, nearly colliding with a dozen different dressers, chairs, book bags, and mysterious piles of dress shirts on my way. I wish I could just be finished with this burdensome day, could come home and lie on the floor and look at the strange patterns created by the early evening shadows. But sadly, I have an extremely malevolent test to get through. Sigh. Somehow, through my somnolence, I prepare for school.
Not too much later, as I prepare to head out the door and begin the slow ride to Scholastic Aptitude Land, I go to my father to say a solemn farewell and ask that he send my love to the family after I am swallowed up by the ferocious bubble sheets. I say good morning, tell him that I’ll be having a terrible morning, and wish him a good day. As usual, he decides to ignore the fact that I need to be at school by a specific time, and begins a conversation with me. He once again offers unsolicited, yet somehow unfailingly prudent, advice. My father has a way of rambling on far longer than is necessary about rather obscure things. He generally sticks to his favorite topics: art history, business networking, and defensive driving. He tells stories about seemingly irrelevant instances of my great uncle driving through a neighbor’s living room or the best way to convince someone to open up a bank account. He’s passed this rambling gene on to me... hmmmm. He tells his stories because he likes to talk to me, and because I love hearing them, but always brings them back to something relevant to my life, or his life, or someone’s life. How, I’ll never know. But his parables have a way of getting stuck in my brain, and popping up at odd times, some helpful, some just strange.
He says to me, as he has said to me on the mornings of every important test or presentation in my entire life, “Don’t worry about it.”
What? WHAT?! I’m tired, I’m cranky, and I’m freaking out about what is so far the most important exam of my life. Yeah, I’m not going to worry about it. I’m suddenly quite skeptical about my father, and beginning to wonder how he did in school, when he says something to make me feel even better: “It’s just a test; it’s not important.”
Wow. This seems like the least helpful thing my father has ever said to me. I smile and say something like, “Yeah, sure,” to placate him. He continues on to say that I’m a very smart kid, and I’ll do fine, and in the long run this test doesn’t really matter anyway. It’s not like it’s the real thing, and even that isn’t so important. I can feel every high school junior and senior cringing at that, but as absurd as I believe his words of wisdom to be, I am comforted a little by the fact that 24 hours from now, the dreaded PSAT’s will be nothing but a memory, and of course, my parents will love me no matter what.
So I take the test, which is not nearly as horrific as I expect, and I do rather well on it. Yay. Scariness over, for now at least.
Of course, that is not the end of it. Junior year goes on to suck royally. There is so much unexpected pressure that I feel as though my head has been shoved into a toaster oven (Sylvia Plath, here I come). I am bombarded with homework, quizzes and tests, midterm and final exams, and of course the king of academic abuse, the SAT. I get punched in the face by so many assessments I don’t know what to do with myself. Each time I say good morning and goodbye to my father, and each time he says the same thing “Don’t worry about it, it’s only a test.” Even if it’s not actually a test, he says it; the presentations, the lengthy assignments, each one is “only a test.”
I eventually came to take great comfort in my father’s words of wisdom. As with all of his exhortations, by listening closely and thinking on his meanings, I gathered the real message my father was imparting: “I love you and think you are sufficiently intelligent, and I don’t care what the tests say.” My father knew that I would always worry, that the tests were rather important, and that I could really benefit from a little confidence boost. He still tells me not to worry about any of it, that soon my current crisis will be over and I will have done fine. He is somehow able to temper my stress with his nonchalance, and can push me to that place in the middle where I can both relax and concentrate, and find that happy medium that actually allows me to get things done. Of course I still worry, but I do so with the knowledge that whatever the outcome of my daily crisis, my father is still there to tell me that there are more important things in life, like Byzantine paintings of the saints or the SMITH system of driving. My father’s seemingly outlandish guidance happens to be the best advice I’ve ever received, because it brings me back down to earth and keeps me from getting lost in the fray of the tumultuous teenage existence.